1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computerized system and method for scheduling mass production manufacturing, and more particularly to a system and method for scheduling mold manufacturing.
2. General Background
Nowadays, competition between manufacturing enterprises is often fierce. Many mass production facilities are upgrading their equipment and systems even faster than before. How to improve manufacturing efficiency and effectively take part in global market competition is becoming a focus of more and more companies. Project Management Systems (PMS) is an approach applied broadly in manufacturing, construction, and engineering. PMS is used to make manufacturing cycle times shorter, improve efficiency, save labor and decrease costs with the development of computer science and technology. Microsoft Project 98, Project 2000 and Project XP are items of PMS software broadly applied in manufacturing, government, and the business world. Taking Project 2000 as an example, when a user proposes to manage a project, he must divide the project into a plurality of tasks manually, and manage each task in four phases. The phases are an original plan, a current plan, a practice plan and an unfinished plan, and the user can check every phase in the database. The advantage of Project 2000 is that it can schedule the project automatically after the user inputs all the needed information.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,761,063, entitled Design and Engineering Project Management System and issued on Jun. 2, 1998, discloses a design and engineering project management system including a computer. The system also preferably includes logic for identifying one or more strategies for achieving group objectives and presenting the strategies in a graphic form which allows for quick comparison of competing strategies. The system further preferably includes logic for quantitatively measuring progress toward each group's stated objectives, and for providing a plurality of graphic displays indicating each group's, and the entire project's, progress toward the respective objectives.
The system described above is structured for flexibility and universality of application in various different areas of endeavor such as education and construction. However, users must set limited resource parameters and manually divide the projects into tasks using other known techniques. This decreases the efficiency of project management. In addition, the system focuses on the projects itself, rather than on constituent units that contribute to executing the projects such as a manufacturing plant and a servicing department. Modern manufacturing enterprises need an effective project management system and method which focus on supporting departments, in order to effectively manage a plurality of projects at the same time.
In a particular example, what is needed is a system for scheduling mold manufacturing which can focus on manufacturing units as objects, schedule mold manufacturing and working procedures, and output a schedule, a work process list and a workload list.
Similarly, what is also needed is a method for scheduling mold manufacturing which can focus on manufacturing units as objects, schedule mold manufacturing and working procedures, and output a schedule, a work process list and a workload list.